France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s

The news from France today is a lesson in the architecture of liberty, built not in sweeping declarations but in the careful, necessary resistance to a single, well-intentioned brick. They wished to build a wall, to declare all those under fifteen unfit for the public square of social media. The court, in its wisdom, struck the mortar from the joints.

The argument for the ban has a familiar, paternal cadence: we must protect the young. Who could dispute the premise? The dangers are real, the vulnerabilities acute. But you say you must protect them. Protection implies guardianship. Guardianship implies a temporary stewardship, exercised until the capacity for self-governance is proven. Yet this law did not propose stewardship; it proposed exile. It did not say, “We will equip you to navigate this square.” It said, “You may not enter the square at all.” To deny the entry is to deny the possibility of the capacity. It is to say the protected class can never graduate from its protection, that the gate is locked not for a season, but by the immutable fact of their years.

This is the old poison in a new vial. The claim of benevolent exclusion, built on a category - age - rather than on the assessment of an individual mind. It is the argument of the plantation, of the factory floor, of every closed room where power says, “I know what is best for you, and you are not fit to know for yourself.” The court saw the flaw in the foundation. Freedom of expression is not an adult privilege, earned at a certain birthday; it is a human practice, learned only in its exercise. You do not learn to speak by being silenced. You do not learn to judge character in a curated silence.

Macron vows to draft anew. Let him. But let any new draft be measured against this standard: does it prepare a child for liberty, or does it merely postpone it? The former is education. The latter is a softer form of bondage, and no less binding for its gentle intent.

16 August 2026.

The French court says banning social media for under-15s violates freedom of expression. Naturally, the children are thrilled - nothing says liberty like being forced to scroll through ads for plastic surgery and crypto scams before breakfast.

Macron promises a new draft. Of course he does. Governments love drafting things - it’s like writing a love letter to bureaucracy, only with more footnotes and less chance of reciprocation. The last draft probably had a clause requiring toddlers to submit their screen time logs in triplicate.

I admire the court’s commitment to principle. If you’re going to defend free speech, why not start with the demographic that uses it primarily to argue about which YouTuber looks better in a wig? Still, it’s a bold stance - protecting the right of children to be exploited by algorithms before they’ve even lost all their baby teeth.

The real solution, of course, is to raise the voting age to 25 and lower the social media age to 6. That way, we can ensure the electorate is both informed and easily distracted.

The judges did what judges are supposed to do: they struck down a clumsy attempt to turn every child’s phone into a revenue stream for the tech giants. The Council said, in plain words, that banning children under fifteen from social media violates freedom of expression - because the law did not merely restrict the platforms, it forbade the children themselves to speak or be spoken to. That is a blunt instrument, and blunt instruments are what tyrants reach for first.

Macron now promises a “new draft.” I have seen that trick before: the first law is too crude to survive the courts, so the second law is wrapped in softer language while carrying the same purpose. They will call it “age verification,” or “parental consent,” or “digital sovereignty,” but the effect will be the same - another wall between the young and the rest of the world.

The real question is not whether children may use social media, but who benefits when they cannot. The platforms profit from endless engagement; the state profits from endless surveillance; the parents are left with the bill. The judges have at least reminded us that freedom is not a privilege to be rationed by age or by algorithm. If Macron wishes to protect children, let him do it with playgrounds that do not charge rent, with libraries that do not harvest data, with schools that do not outsource discipline to Silicon Valley. Anything else is just another enclosure of the commons.